Live Well, Stay Rich, Never Retire — Part Three

As a wealth advisor, my mission is to inspire and empower entrepreneurs and business owners. I help them fulfill their professional ambitions, achieve financial independence and become the best versions of themselves. How? By introducing them to the approach to living, planning and investing that fuels my personal and professional success. I call it Live Well, Stay Rich, Never Retire.This article is the third in a three-part series. Read part one — Live Well — and part two — Stay Rich — to see the complete picture of how this philosophy and framework can fuel your success.

Part Three — Never Retire

The third element of my philosophy for living, planning and investing isn’t broken down into three steps. It’s an invitation to embrace a new way of thinking about one of the most ingrained and established notions we have about work: retirement.

If you step back and think about it, you can reflect on how normal it has become to accept the idea that a career is something you do until a certain age before they put you (or you put yourself) out to pasture on a golf course, beach or curling rink.

The fact is that the concept of retirement — and a particular age when you should do it — is entirely arbitrary. It’s also contrary to everything business owners know about the meaning, purpose, and satisfaction their work brings to their lives.

Allow me to offer you an alternative view of your future.

By the way, this is not about promoting a life of toil where we all work to the bone until death comes calling. This is about how to Live Well and Stay Rich!

Over the course of more than 25 years working with business owners, I have learned that they love running their businesses. The idea of stepping back often fills them with dread, and those who have done so often wander listlessly through their “retirement,” not sure what to do with themselves.

What if it never had to be that way?

Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach came up with an inspiring idea he calls “A Self Managing Company.”

Imagine this.

What if you could build your business to the point where you had the right people in the right positions so that you could focus exclusively on the parts of the business that you enjoy and are good at? Better yet, what if you could set your business up to give you the personal flexibility to pursue everything on your bucket list, all while continuing to earn well into your later life?

Would you still want to retire? I doubt it.

In his book Unique Ability: find your purpose in life and define your best self, Sullivan explains that we all have a set of natural talents that motivate us and create purpose in our lives. He refers to these talents as “Unique Abilities.” He argues that when we operate within our unique abilities, we produce services/products/ideas that add value for our customers without making us tired, overwhelmed or burnt out. By identifying and following our unique abilities, we can simultaneously achieve personal and professional success.

Imagine what it would be like if you only ever worked in areas that fit your unique abilities and delegated everything else to other people with their unique ability for tasks you don’t enjoy and aren’t good at.

Over the last few years, I have been following this model. It has had an enormous positive impact on my business and my life.

I began by identifying that my unique abilities lie in three areas:

1. Studying and creating investment strategies that have the potential of outperforming benchmarks

2. Using my 25+ years of financial planning experience to create valuable content in the form of blogs and podcasts

3. Marketing “value add “services to new clients

From there, I started accessing the resources I needed to shape my practice so I do what comes naturally to me while letting other people do what comes naturally to them. Finding people to join my team whose unique abilities complement my own has had a major impact.

For example, I have a passion for sharing my knowledge and expressing my ideas. I can sit down and work on a blog like this for hours without feeling tired, bored or overwhelmed. I love it and it comes easily to me. But I have a commerce degree and have spent most of my life working with numbers, so my writing style isn’t exactly going to win me a Booker Prize. Knowing this, I connected with an editor whose unique ability is to take my sometimes jumbled thoughts and smooth them out into a readable and accessible article.

Speaking of Booker Prizes, Margaret Atwood is a great example of someone living her unique ability. At age 79, she shows no signs of slowing down and just made headlines across the literary world by releasing The Testaments, the highly-anticipated follow up to her seminal work, The Handmaid’s Tale. (Yes, my editor added the word seminal to amplify my idea — our complementary abilities on display!) I have never met Margaret Atwood, but it doesn’t take much to see that she isn’t suffering from burn out or thinking about retirement. That’s the power of unique abilities.

What’s your unique ability and how can you set your business up to make sure you can Never Retire?

That’s it. A transformative idea to change the way you think about your life and career. Find your unique ability, stick to it, delegate everything else, and retire in your business.

Read part one — Live Well — and part two — Stay Rich — to finish out the series.

Did this article resonate with you? What did I miss? Send me a note and let’s start the conversation. The process of finding a commission-free financial planner in Toronto can be overwhelming. Our proprietary financial planning process is designed with you in mind. Its simple framework helps you make an informed decision about hiring the appropriate advisor.

Call me if you want to map out how you can Never Retire. You can also subscribe to our Never Retire newsletter, contact us to Order a complimentary book, register for one of our events, and to meet with a Certified Financial Planner. We offer you a range of services from a wealth plan to investment advice or help you take advantage of our investment models. Call me at 416–355–6370 or email me at [email protected]

Originally published at https://richarddri.ca on December 12, 2019.